Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Yesterday, I wrote about the embarassing fawning of Republican John McCain over George W. Bush last weekend, and McCain’s increasingly weird support for the scheme to hand over operations of American ports to a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates. John McCain’s recent actions, I concluded, suggest that he may not be a moderate after all.

Then I took a look at Senator McCain’s broader legislative record, and what I found astonished me. In our legislative scorecard of the US Senate, Senator McCain is shown to have supported progressive legislation only 8 percent of the time, while McCain supported right wing legislation 75 percent of the time. That’s not a moderate record. It’s a record of right wing extremism.

It turns out that we’re not the only ones catching on to the fraud behing the John McCain moderate hype. Over at the Down With Tyranny Blog, there’s a good discussion of the issue of McCain’s false moderation, which is then amended by a comment carrying an op-ed column by Paul Krugman published in the New York Times yesterday, coming to the same conclusion. Krugman calls McCain The Right’s Man.

It’s a coincidence that three separate people came to the same conclusion about John Mccain on the same day, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Just a tiny bit of digging into the substance of John McCain’s political career makes it clear that McCain is every bit as much the right winger that George W. Bush is.

For that reason, we’ve added a new section to our No Republicans for President in 2008 political shop. It’s called, simply, Not John McCain for President in 2008. We’ve just started adding to our selection there this morning, but it’s growing fast, so check back soon for more anti-McCain items.